State presents trimmed-down list of I-290 widening options

Four proposals are offered to community task force

February 27, 2013|By Michelle Manchir, Chicago Tribune reporter

State transportation officials presented a narrowed list of four proposals that they say will improve travel on the Eisenhower Expressway, all of which include adding a lane to the highway and also extending the CTA Blue Line.

The four proposals, all of which include widening the highway between Austin Boulevard and Mannheim Road, extending the Blue Line to Mannheim and express bus service extending westward from Mannheim, were presented to a community task force. They will be further evaluated by state transportation officials as they study ways to make Interstate Highway 290 more efficient, said a manager of the project, Peter Harmet, bureau chief of programming for the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Harmet, along with other representatives from IDOT and the CTA, spoke Feb. 21 in Oak Park with about 50 members from the local corridor advisory group and task force, made up largely of community representatives with technical expertise, an interest in the project or both. Members of the public were also invited.

Harmet told the group the four alternatives provide the best overall combination of improving travel through the corridor, improving safety, boosting transit ridership and increasing commuters' access to jobs. He said the alternatives were developed after considering stakeholder comments of previously released project concepts.

Also at the meeting, a project manager for the CTA, Janine Farzin, said the CTA will soon begin its "vision study" of the Blue Line, which she said will focus on upgrading the system's current transit stops rather than extending the line. She said the study area is the existing Blue Line from Clinton to Forest Park, and continuing to Mannheim Road for review of IDOT transit proposals.

"We're not actually looking at expansion alternatives in this vision study," she said. "…Our focus is going to be on the existing facility."

After the meeting, Farzin said the CTA is open to working with IDOT on a Blue Line extension in the future.

The Eisenhower Expressway study is expected to remain in a planning phase until 2014, and there is no funding at this point for the second phase, which would include construction, said a spokesman for IDOT, Mike Claffey.

While the original study area for the project, the planning for which began in 2009, was the nine-mile stretch from Mannheim Road to Cicero Avenue, Harmet said at the Feb. 21 meeting the study area has been expanded to include four miles farther east to the Circle Interchange.

"As we began to develop various alternatives, through technical analysis and stakeholder input, we found that our managed lane options should extend four miles further east to be the most effective," Harmet said in an email after the meeting.

The plans presented by IDOT sparked questions from audience members, many of whom, from their questions, seemed skeptical of IDOT's favored alternatives.

Some worried the added lane would just bring a higher volume of traffic and encourage urban sprawl.

"Twenty years from now, 25 years from now, 30 years from now we're going to come back and have the same conversation about adding yet another lane," said David Pope, a member of the task force and the village president of Oak Park. "…I guess I'm just not sure where I see this stopping."

Harmet said a public meeting about the project is expected to be held during the summer.